Monday, December 10, 2012

DailyMile, I'm moving on

I'm a big believer in collecting data to track performance and for making decisions. I've been doing the same thing with my fitness activities, which up until a few months ago, was primarily running.  I would track my routes, distances and times on DailyMile.
Recently, I started CrossFit and my ideas of fitness have changed from simply distance, rate and time (though its a great basis for motion).  Fitness for me now includes:
  1. Cardio-vascular and cardio respiratory endurance 
  2. Stamina
  3. Strength
  4. Flexibility
  5. Power 
  6. Speed 
  7. Coordination
  8. Agility 
  9. Balance
  10. Accuracy
DailyMile is a great site, but it can't track these.  I've started Olympic lifting and kettle bell work and my progress includes increasing the weight on these exercises.  In just a few months, I've gone from not being able to do a pull-up on my own to where I can do 5 pull-ups after a WOD!
It's not that Daily Mile is a bad site, but I want to track more than just distance, rate and time.  Its a great site if you are a runner, walker, rower, biker - any of those distance and time kind of sports.  DM is great, I found the community quite motivating to keep me running regularly.
As a CrossFitter, I need to track more than that.  I've started tracking my performance and improvement with Beyond The WhiteBoard.  I have a community of CrossFitters at my gym, Cascade CrossFit and the people who come to the 6am session.
On BTW, I can not only track my activities, but also my hydration, sleep and nutrition.  It doesn't have the same social component as DM, but I can still push my updates to Twitter. 
I'm not walking away entirely from DM, I still run 2 days a week, so I'll double post those (and hopefully not push them to Twitter) and when we do some distance based WOD, I'll probably post those too.
DailyMile has been great, but its time for me to move on.